The Icamina House in Kalibo, Aklan — the ancestral residence of former mayor Federico Icamina — has developed a reputation so supernatural that passing motorists have adopted a ritualized defense: honking their horns as they drive by the property, a noise-making tradition meant to ward off the ghosts and the kapre that are said to inhabit the grounds.
The kapre of Icamina House is the most feared resident. In Filipino mythology, the kapre is a towering, dark-skinned giant who lives in large trees and smokes an enormous cigar whose glowing tip is visible from great distances. The kapre is territorial, mischievous, and capable of driving humans to disorientation and madness if provoked. At the Icamina House, the kapre is said to inhabit one of the large trees on the property, and its presence is announced by the smell of tobacco smoke drifting across the road when no visible smoker is nearby.
The ghosts of the house itself are more conventional — figures seen in windows, sounds of activity from within the building during hours when no one should be present, and the general atmospheric dread that Filipino communities associate with houses whose inhabitants have departed but whose spiritual residents have not. The Icamina family's prominence in Kalibo politics adds a layer of community memory to the haunting: a powerful family's ancestral home, now marked by supernatural activity, becomes a physical reminder of the passage of power and the impermanence of human influence.
The honking ritual practiced by motorists passing the house is a Filipinized version of apotropaic behavior found across cultures — using noise to frighten away evil spirits. In the Visayan tradition, loud sounds are believed to startle supernatural entities and prevent them from attaching to passing travelers. The fact that the practice persists among Kalibo motorists speaks to the ongoing belief in the house's spiritual activity, regardless of the rationalizations that modernity might offer.